Linabella’s Pesto

Michelle Morelli Howard and her husband, Jeffrey Howard, produce six varieties of pesto using garlic and basil from their organic-style Oakham, Massachusetts farm. Their Genovese-style pestos are so rich, dense and powerfully flavorful, they’re near ringers for sauce made by mortar and pestle. Linabella’s Traditional Pesto is a chunky, garlicky, dark green paste in which each of the fine ingredients—extra virgin olive oil (first cold press), fresh basil, garlic, imported Romano and Parmesan cheeses and pine nuts—stands out. This lovely sauce is perfect for pasta, pizza and bruschetta, but because it’s so thick, it can be slathered on sandwiches or used as a base for other sauces. The Garlic Lover’s Pesto shares the Traditional Pesto’s dense consistency and serves up a knockout punch of garlic flavor. They’re not kidding—this is meant for people who adore garlic; so if you merely like the stuff, try it as a chopped garlic substitute rather than a sauce.

Perhaps the most exciting members of the product line are the sweet pestos, traditional basil blends with either honey or maple syrup. The Honey Pesto has a thick, chutney-like consistency, with an amber tinge to its deep green hue. It starts out honey-sweet on the tongue, but soon the pine nuts, basil and garlic become more pronounced, giving it a distinctly earthy quality. It begs to be mixed with goat cheese and toasted walnuts, or dabbed on pork sausage. The Kelly-green Maple Pesto at first tastes a bit cloying, but quickly turns a noticeably maple flavor. It’s glorious atop cooked fish (we love it on wild salmon), or mixed into scrambled eggs (served with bacon).

But our favorite preparation comes at the suggestion of Mr. Howard: “For something a little naughty, mix some maple pesto with cream cheese, smear it on a bagel and top it with Canadian bacon and a fried egg.” Now that’s what we call breakfast! Linabella’s also makes a Vegan Pesto and Sole Verde, a pesto of garlic scapes. The young shoots of garlic that sprout from the underground garlic bulb and make their way to the surface are quite a delicacy—if you don’t catch them when they’re green and tasty, they becomes hard and white like the covering of the cloves.